


if it be thus to dream, still let me sleep

by moonrocks



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Character Study, Dreams, M/M, Nightmares, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25237798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonrocks/pseuds/moonrocks
Summary: Nacho has confusing dreams.Written for Lacho Week. Day 1: Dreams and Nightmares.
Relationships: Eduardo "Lalo" Salamanca/Ignacio "Nacho" Varga
Comments: 12
Kudos: 34
Collections: Lacho Week 2020





	if it be thus to dream, still let me sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for blood, injury, and violence.
> 
> Set after the season five finale.

Nacho should have known Fring would never let him go. 

He could have done everything he asked, followed every instruction that was left for him. He could have been an obedient foot soldier in his silent war against the Salamancas and the Juarez cartel, then disappeared with his father across the northern border, never to be heard from again. Yet, it would never be enough. There would always be more for him to do. And when that was no longer true, he would be taken care of.

Nacho just thought he had more time before that happened.

He runs.

His lungs burn as he sprints from the southern gate, unaware of what awaits him on the other side. The phone call had been cryptic, giving him minimal instructions. There was no promise of a getaway car or someone to meet him and take him far away from here. He should have taken it as a sign.

Instead, he runs. He ignores the faint rattling of gunfire muffled by the walls that barricade Lalo inside his hacienda. It was supposed to be a safe haven, his home.

Nacho thinks of the innocents. The gardener, Cecilio, who tended to the vegetables, and Yolanda, who cooked them, her hands soft, wrinkled, weatherworn. He remembers their warmth, how they had smiled as Lalo embraced them, but Nacho can’t remember their faces. They both look like his father, their eyes pained and dulled with age. His father regards him. Disappointment is plain on his face, the lines around his mouth deepening into a frown before his features twist in horror. 

Nacho keeps running. 

*

Nacho should have known the assassins were never going to do the job clean. Despite any assurances, he was always going to be caught in the crossfire. It was just a matter of when he stopped being useful. 

Nacho hears the screech of tires first, somewhere down the road that leads away from the house, then he hears the rattle of gunfire. Two sharp pops, celebratory like a cork bursting from a bottle of champagne. 

He falls to the ground from the force of the bullet. At first, he feels nothing, then he feels pain, then nothing, then pain again. It’s excruciating, all-encompassing like a thousand sewing needles breaching his flesh to pin him to the dirt. He bites down on his tongue to keep himself from screaming. Blood blooms in his mouth. 

He’s bleeding out. They’re trying to find him. Pain then nothing, pain then nothing, then pain, pain, pain. He’s fading out. A moment passes, then Nacho hears more gunfire. None of it comes from the direction it came from before. It sounds different. Maybe the blood has clogged his ears. He coughs and tastes metal on the roof of his mouth. He is drowning in it. 

Hands find him and pull him out.

 _Lalo._

Nacho thinks he sees tears in Lalo’s eyes as Lalo looks down at him dying. It must just be the moonlight. 

*

Nacho should have seen it coming. 

Lalo lives. He’s a Salamanca after all: the hydra of all cartel families. Cut one head off and two more emerge in its place. Nacho had tried severing them himself, over and over and over again. He needs to cauterize the wounds before the heads grow, but his fingers slip every time. He’s careless, inexperienced, just a boy. He should never have cut through their flesh in the first place. 

Nacho can hear Lalo moving around the room. He recognizes the weight of his footsteps against the floor. His movements always toe the line between manic and unhurried, seamlessly transitioning between the two, but gone is his usual ease. It sounds like he’s limping, the heel of his heavy boot dragging across the floor.

Nacho is delirious. He has lost a lot of blood. He hears the name Salamanca echoing in his head, spelled out in the dark, each letter red. His eyes are open but he can’t see anything. He thinks he might be blind or still out in the field where the men shot him. But there used to be stars above him. There are no stars now, just black. 

_I must be dead,_ Nacho thinks nonsensically. _Lalo must be dead. This must be hell and I must be down here with him. This must be a nightmare. This must be hell. This must be hell. This must be—_

Nacho sees something in his periphery: a flicker of light dancing at the corner of his eye. Lalo is sitting by a lantern, his hardened face obscured by shadow. His clothes are stained with dirt and blood. Probably not his own. 

“Am I dead?” Nacho asks. 

“No,” Lalo says flatly. “Not yet, at least.”

“Where am I?” 

“A safehouse. The assassins, the men who shot you, are dead.”

“What happened?” Nacho feels tears seep down his cheeks as panic swells in his chest. He mistakes them for blood before he tastes them, warm and briny on his cracked lips. “Where am I?”

Lalo hushes him. It’s supposed to be calming, but it only makes Nacho whimper. He has no idea how much Lalo knows: if Lalo knows it was him who opened the gate, that it was Fring who hired the assassins. Nacho clings to the fact that somehow he’s still alive. If Lalo knew, he would have killed him by now. Yet, he could be toying with him, waiting to see what information he’s holding out on before finishing the job.

Lalo stands and Nacho has the urge to flinch away from him, but he can’t move. His torso is wrapped in duct tape, an emergency solution to stem the bleeding from the bullet wound somewhere in his chest. The tape slides against his skin as he breathes. The pain is too much. Just blinking makes his body ache. 

Lalo sits down in the empty chair beside him. In this lighting, he appears panda-eyed, his pupils undefined from the rest of his face. His presence is overbearing, suffocating. Nacho feels crushed beneath the weight of him. His anger is palpable, fizzling in the air like static. 

“It was you, Ignacio,” Lalo says. “I know it was you. _Me mentiste_.”

Nacho feels himself forcibly fading from consciousness, like his mind is trying to escape the pain that his body can’t. The corners of his vision vignette like a poorly developed photograph. He thinks he feels Lalo take his hand. It could be his imagination—his mind wrongly interpreting the touch—but it seems as real as the blood seeping down his sides. Lalo places a kiss in the centre of his palm. Nacho imagines a bullet wound forming where his lips were. 

Nacho has been marked. He is a crucified man.

*

Nacho has confusing dreams. 

Most of them are about his father. Fragmented memories pass beneath his eyelids in pixelated fractals like a late-night TV commercial. His father is sitting in his chair on the porch, twenty years younger than when Nacho saw him last. His hands are rough from working leather all day as he pats the spot beside him on the settee. He beckons for Nacho to come. 

Nacho sits, still a child and yet fully grown. He looks at his own hands, soft before similar calluses can form from holding a gun, before he learned how to pull the trigger. 

Nacho watches himself and his father from afar. He tries to get closer, but he feels static against his face. He hears the low hum of electricity. It pulls him in before pushing him away again.

The image fades.

Some of his dreams are about Lalo. He sees fragments of their first meeting. Sitting side-by-side in the restaurant as the atmosphere grows heavy with steam from the kitchen. He sees the wordless drive from Albuquerque to the border, the desert endless in every direction. Lalo grins menacingly as he approaches Nacho, too close for comfort. His presence is hot against his face. His skin sizzles and snaps like twigs nestled between the coals of a budding fire.

Nacho watches as Lalo sprouts vines and branches from his body. They are ripe with pearly, blood-red apples. The branches grow around him, tangling in his grey-streaked hair and twisting from his mouth like a wooden tongue. They fashion themselves into a crown that tips lazily off his head: a dirt king that has come to claim his dirt throne. Their mouths meet and Nacho tastes it on his lips, feels its grit settle atop his gums.

These images consume him, real in their unreality. Less dreams than they are distorted memories, less memories than they are nightmares. 

*

Nacho wakes up days later in a hospital bed. There is an IV in his arm that feeds him fluids from the hooked bag beside him and a pulse oximeter on his finger to measure his heart rate. The jagged line is displayed on a monitor to his left, beeping disconcertingly. Disregarding the medical equipment, the room around him is wholly domestic. The walls are papered with florals and decorated with generic landscape paintings, lacey curtains flirting in the breeze.

Soaked in sweat, throat dry and limbs weak, Nacho attempts to sit up. He quickly realizes his right wrist is handcuffed to the bed, pinning him firmly against the mattress. He lifts up his arm to hear the cuffs rattle. The sound is a confirmation that Lalo knows about his betrayal, if his admittance was not already enough.

Nacho spends most of the day half-conscious. More dreams, fuelled by the morphine pumping into his veins through the IV. They feel farther away as a result, just like the pain in his abdomen, the stitches in his side. He fails to remember his dreams as he opens his eyes then closes them again, falls into another forced and restless sleep. 

As he drifts in and out, a physician comes into the room intermittently to check his vitals: probably some cartel associate, someone Lalo is paying good money for. Nacho never really gets a good look at his face, or his assistants, or the housemaid. He purposefully averts his eyes, too exhausted most of the time to keep them open. 

Eventually, he has to eat. An old woman wordlessly brings him a tray of food. She reminds him of Yolanda: thinning grey hair, wrinkles around her drooping eyes. He manages to stomach a cup of soup and two spoonfuls of strawberry Jell-O before he feels like vomiting, clumsily using his uncuffed hand to shovel it into his mouth. He stains the front of his undershirt, which is already scabbed with dried blood. It sticks to his bandages and his wound, stained with the vague outline of pinkish sweat and now goopy Jell-O. Nacho weathers it, never asking the assistant who inspects his bandages to change his shirt or even to let him bathe. 

He’s too tired. There is blood on his hands, seeping beneath his fingernails. He doubts he, or his hands, will ever be clean again.

The assistant leaves, jotting something about his condition down onto a clipboard. The door opens. The door closes. They never speak to Nacho and Nacho never speaks to them. He never asks what their names are, what Lalo wants with him, where he really is. Every time he hears movement on the other side of the door, he stiffens.

He thinks of Lalo, just as he dreams of him.

Three days pass before Lalo shows his face in the realm beyond nightmares. In the middle of the night, Nacho wakes up from a fitful sleep. His breath fights its way from his chest. His sweat soaks through his sheets, the bullet wound in his side searing like a palm against a burning stovetop. He can still see his dream embossed on his eyelids: the image of his father lifeless in a puddle of blood as he stands above him. There is a reddened knife white-knuckled in hand. Lalo is behind him. His chest presses against his back, fingers closing around his wrist as he guides the knife edge to his own throat. 

Nacho gasps, eyes opening, and there Lalo is, standing on the other side of the lightless room. Nacho should be scared—he _knows_ he should be—but he’s too disoriented for anything other than confusion, too unsure of reality. Perhaps his dreams are bleeding into his wakefulness once more. Perhaps he’s dead after all.

_This is hell._

From what Nacho can tell, Lalo is unarmed, the disquieting calmness that characterized him at the safehouse apparent now as Lalo looks over at him, his face unchanging.

“Nightmares?” Lalo asks. His question is objective, void of emotion.

Nacho swallows down the pit in his throat. “No.” His voice is raspy from disuse, but it comes out steady. “Do you have them?”

Lalo walks over to the end of the bed. His limp is gone, each footstep as measured as the one before. Nacho wonders whether more time has passed since the assassination attempt than he thought. In and out of consciousness, he can barely tell morning from the afternoon, let alone how many hours have elapsed without a clock to confirm his suspicions.

“No, no nightmares,” Lalo says. “I never sleep, Ignacio, so I never dream.”

Lalo laughs, more out of habit than any kind of amusement. His eyes remain steely, unblinking. Nacho watches as Lalo circles him, then leans forward to grip the end of the bed frame. He eyes Nacho like a nocturnal animal eyes its prey through the dark. 

“What do you want with me, Lalo?” Nacho asks, defiant even in his weakened state.

Undoubtedly, Lalo has had enough time to figure out what happened that night. He has had enough time to go back to his hacienda to survey the wreckage, the carnage, the death. He must know who unlocked the gate, who let the assassins through and accidentally led them to slaughter.

Nacho is probably as good as dead, yet he has to believe his father is safe in Albuquerque. Alive, alone, waiting. Fring has no reason to hurt him. Nacho knows the Chilean by now. He knows that he never moves his chess pieces forward or backwards unless the maneuver counts for something. Without a reliable line of communication between the two of them, it would be pointless for Fring to spill unnecessary blood. The message would fall on deaf ears.

“Tell me, Ignacio,” Lalo says. His anger finally begins to crack through his facade. He bares his teeth. “Why would you turn against my family? After everything the Salamancas have given you? Why would you betray us?” 

Nacho says nothing, considering his answer for a moment. An admittance that Fring was using his father as leverage would imply there was something else to back Nacho into that corner. Otherwise, he would have had recourse with the Salamancas, no reason to obey Fring. Soon enough, Lalo would know about Tuco. He would know about Hector. But until then, Lalo might keep Nacho alive, as long as he remains useful.

“I did it for the money,” Nacho says. He has nothing to lose now but his father, nothing else to protect. His own life is unimportant. “Before you came to Albuquerque, Fring approached me with an offer,” he continues. “Get rid of the Salamancas, undermine your entire operation, and once you were out of the picture, Fring was going to cut me in. I would control the competition up north, refit your distribution method, and increase your production. A risk maybe, but Fring promised me you’d be taken care of.”

Nacho looks at Lalo, finally meeting his eyes. He expects his face to harden at the false admittance, but it’s already stone.

“Tell me everything.”

*

Nacho dreams of the upholstery shop. 

It was always so quiet in the hours before Nacho caught the bus to school. He helped his father open the shop, sweep the floors, check the books. The smell of tanned leather sticks to his nostril hairs as he breathes in. The sun, swarming with dustlight, is warm on the back of his neck.

He blinks and he’s sitting beside his father in the backroom. He feels the wakeful prick of a needle against his thumb as his father teaches him how to sew. Buttons, then mending holes, then learning how to work the machines. He sews straight stitches into a scrap piece of fabric as his father places an encouraging hand against his back.

“Good, Ignacio. Very good.”

Nacho hears him laugh, but when he looks up, Lalo is who he sees. His smile is pleasant, void of malice. His patterned cotton shirt is unrumpled and untucked from his jeans.

It reminds Nacho of afternoons spent at the race track, dust sticking to his clothes and his skin. It was where Lalo kissed him for the first time, sinking his teeth into his bottom lip and pressing him up against the sun-cooked hood of his car. The memory warps, different time, different place, and Lalo is humming a familiar tune as he cooks breakfast at _El Michoacano_. Nacho counts cash. A hundred dollar bill feels soft beneath his fingertips.

He stuffs it into his mouth and chews.

*

The lie must placate Lalo, because the next morning, Nacho is allowed to leave his room.

The old woman helps him out of bed and into a wheelchair, then silently maneuvers him out onto the veranda. The wheelchair functions as something else to cuff him to, but his body is too weak to do much standing anyways. He looks down at his hands clutching the armrests and thinks of Hector: a cruel irony if not an intentional one. 

He can hear the ocean from here but not see it. The rhythmic rolling of waves sounds like hands cupping his ears. As the breeze soothes his feverish skin, he listens to the woman turning out the sheets, remaking the bed then puttering about the room. The sound reminds Nacho of his mother, or what half-formed memories he has left of her. She’s but a suggestion in his mind, a shallow impression that has been further worn away by time. He remembers what his father used to say about her more than he remembers her voice, or her smell or touch or her footfall on the floor.

Nacho grips the tattered remnants of his button-down in his fist. It was washed—probably by accident—with the rest of his clothes that now lay folded on the wardrobe. The bullet hole is the only thing that reminds Nacho of his survival. He pokes a finger through it, feels the stray threads tickle his skin.

When the woman is done, Nacho asks her for a needle and thread. For some reason, she gives it to him.

Throughout the remainder of the afternoon, Nacho takes his time mending the shirt. The rhythmic push and pull of the needle through the fabric distracts Nacho from the ache that consumes his whole body. It’s something even painkillers cannot reach. When the hole is mended, he ties the loose threads together and inspects his handiwork. The stitching is sloppy, out of practice and marred by his shaky hands, but Nacho feels satisfied. He disregards the bloodstains that twist across the shirt, vague suggestions that disappear into the already maroon fabric. 

The physician returns to give him another dose. He drifts in and out, but his mind is blank.

When he wakes, he sees Lalo for a second time. Lalo is sitting on the lounge chair across from him. His elbows rest atop his knees as he thoughtfully rubs a finger back and forth across his moustache. He glances over at Nacho as Nacho straightens in his wheelchair. Recognition flickers in Lalo’s eyes.

“When you were bleeding, out of your mind,” Lalo says, “you asked me if you were dead. Do you remember that, Ignacio?”

Nacho blinks at him, confused, as the memory gradually returns to him. The wound in his side flares. He slowly nods.

Lalo chuckles. It’s a sinister rumble that erupts deep in his chest, like thunder just before it storms. “Funny the things we come up with when our minds are half-awake.”

“What is this place?” Nacho asks. 

“Nowhere in particular. An in-between. Somewhere I can think.” Lalo shrugs, then smirks, gazing out at the horizon. The wind cards through his hair, unkempt across his forehead. Nacho wonders if Lalo can see the ocean from where he’s sitting. He wonders if there’s any beginning or end to this place at all. “That intel you gave me was good. It proved useful.” 

Nacho supposes he should feel relieved that Lalo has decided to spare his life for now. But he also thinks the press of a gun against his skull would be just as comforting as a few minutes out in the sun. His grip tightens around his tattered shirt. He thinks of his father.

“Heal up, Ignacio,” Lalo says as he stands. Even in the softened evening, he looks harsh and unrecognizable, the playfulness that Nacho grew accustomed to in Albuquerque wholly displaced. The facade has been forgotten. For some reason, Nacho feels a yearning in his chest that hurts more than the chunk of flesh torn from his side. “We have a war to win.”

With that, Lalo goes. The ocean grows noisier. Its presence is overbearing as Nacho closes his eyes. 

He is no longer dreaming. And yet, the nightmare persists.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize that this ended up being kind of bizarre and experimental instead of very shippy. Please forgive me!
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
